Monday Debrief: January 6th Hearings and More Supreme Court Opinions

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Brian Lehrer: This is special coverage of the January 6th committee hearings on WNYC. I'm Brian Lehrer till two o'clock following the two-hour-plus committee hearing. Alison Stewart will return with all of it in this time slot tomorrow. Then more committee hearings, by the way, Wednesday morning. We'll probably be doing something similar starting ten o'clock with live coverage Wednesday morning, and then breaking it down early Wednesday afternoon. We'll go to more of your calls and your tweets as we go and more clips. I'm going to play a couple of what I think are very interesting clips from pretty early in the session this morning that you may not have heard.

Joining us to help do that is Emily Bazelon, New York Times Magazine staff writer, Yale Law School professor, and co-host of the Slate's Politics Podcast. Emily also was watching the Supreme Court this morning, which issued a few rulings, including a potentially important one on immigration, so we'll try to get in a few words on that. Hey, Emily, thanks for joining us for special coverage.

Emily Bazelon: Thanks so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Now, I want to focus more closely on just how many people. We played Barr and Richard Donoghue, Barr's deputy, but just how many people in Trump's immediate orbit, not just the two of them, advise Trump that he was out in left field on this stuff. Earlier, Quinta and I were talking before the hearings began about the fact that Trump's 2020 campaign manager, Bill Stepien, was supposed to testify this morning, but canceled at the last minute saying his wife had gone into labor. I still want to know if it was induced labor like, "Oh, let's do this today."

We wish the expanding Stepien family well, in any case. The committee delayed the start for 45 minutes today because of that last-minute cancellation. It seems to me that they use the time to organize video clips of Bill Stepien from the on-the-record interview that he did previously with the committee. Here's a clip that they played of Stepien describing Trump's desire to declare victory even before the initial results of the election were in on election night. We'll also hear Trump campaign advisor, Jason Miller, in this clip.

Jason Miller: It was far too early to be making any calls like that. Ballots were still being counted, ballots were still going to be counted for days, and it was far too early to be making any proper motion like that.

Bill Stepien: To the best of my memory, I was saying that we should not go declare victory until we had a better sense of the numbers.

Jason Miller: Okay, can you be more specific about that conversation, in particular, what Mayor Giuliani said, your response, and then anybody else in the room's response?

Bill Stepien: I think effectively, Mayor Giuliani was saying, "We want it. They're stealing it from us. Where did all the votes come from? We need to go say that we won." Essentially, to anyone who didn't agree with that position was being weak.

Brian Lehrer: Giuliani said anybody who disagreed with the idea of declaring victory even while the votes were still initially being counted on election night and swing states hadn't even initially been called, Giuliani said anybody not willing to go along and declare victory even in those conditions was weak. Here's another clip of Bill Stepien, Trump's 2020 campaign manager, asked if he wanted out of the election fraud effort some weeks after the election was called to save his reputation.

Bill Stepien: I didn't mind being categorized. There were two groups of family. We call them my team and Rudy's team. I didn't mind being characterized as being part of team normal as reporters started to do around that point in time. I said hours ago, early on that, I've been doing this for a long time, 25 years, and I've spent political ideologies from Trump to McCain to Bush to Christie. I can work under a lot of circumstances for a lot of varied candidates and politicians. I think on the web built up a pretty good, I hope, a good reputation for being honest and professional. I didn't think what was happening was necessarily honest or professional at that point in time.

Brian Lehrer: Emily, Bill Stepien, who himself, like Bill Barr, has long, not just ties but long history of being at the center of Republican Party politics and campaigns. He mentioned some of the campaigns he worked on. People in New Jersey may remember he was a central Bridgegate figure. He was one of the people who Chris Christie blamed that scandal on most centrally when he was Christie's campaign manager in Christie's 2013 reelection campaign. Somebody, rather, ordered the lanes to the George Washington Bridge from Fort Lee closed off because the mayor of Fort Lee had refused to endorse Christie for reelection.

Maybe being involved with Bridgegate was a qualification for Trump to hire Bill Stepien onto his own campaign, I don't know, but this deep red Republican decided he wanted to be on what he characterized there as team normal, rather than team Rudy. What did we learn from Bill Stepien?

Emily Bazelon: I think what you're seeing here is the difference between being highly partisan and not reality-based. You could call it team normal, or you could just call it team reality. Even people who deeply want their candidates to win, fight for them, are in all the way on the politics, when you lose an election, they accept that result. I think that's the dividing line here with Bill Barr, with Stepien. What's incredible is that it became such a point of contention that this is even news that these people are taking this point of view.

Brian Lehrer: Here's one more of Bill Barr describing a time after the election when the president called him in. Remember the context here is we're looking at just how many people really were on team normal, to use Stepien's phrase, who were in Trump's immediate circle. You will hear Barr describe how many people, he'll name names of various people in Trump's orbit, who thought Trump was in his own weird Idaho on these things. Bill Barr.

Bill Barr: I came over to meet with the president in the Oval Office and Meadows and Cipollone were there. This is leading up to this conversation with Kushner. The president said there had been major fraud and that as soon as the facts were out, the results of the election would be reversed. He went on on this for quite a while as he's prone to do, and then he got to something that I was expecting, which is to say that apparently, the Department of Justice doesn't think that it has a role of looking into these frauds claims. I said that has to be the campaign that raises that with the state. The department doesn't take sides in elections, and the department is not an extension of your legal team.

Our role is to investigate fraud and look at something if it's specific credible and could have affected the outcome of the election and we're doing that. They're just not meritorious, they're not panning out. As I walked out of the Oval Office, Jared was there with Dan Scavino, who ran the president's social media and who I thought was a reasonable guy and believe is a reasonable guy. I said, "How long is he going to carry on with this stolen election stuff? Where's this going to go?"

By that time, Meadows had caught up with me and leaving the office and caught up with me and he said, "Look, I think that he's becoming more realistic and knows that the limit to how far he can take this." Then Jared said, "Yes, we're working on this. We're working on it."

Brian Lehrer: Bill Barr and videotaped testimony that was played today. Emily, team normal starts to look pretty big there. Dan Scavino, the president social media director, Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, Pat Cipollone, the White House Counsel, Mark Meadows, the chief of staff, all are like, "Yes, I know, we're humoring him, but there's only so far he can go with this." They miss underestimated him as George Bush might have said in terms of that, but team normal was really pretty big. Which again, might land with some people if they have doubt in their mind as to whether the election was stolen.

Emily Bazelon: Yes, it's such a good question who this is going to land with. The testimony from Barr, the extent of team normal, it shows that something we already know, which is the emperor had no clothes. Former presidents Trump's claims about election fraud were false. What is really being driven home by this hearing is that everyone around him was telling him that. There were obviously these figures outside of the administration like Rudy Giuliani, who were delivering another message, but Trump knew from the facts that were being reported to him that he was making false allegations.

Does that matter in the court of a public opinion? Trump is going to deny all of this. He already has, does it matter legally speaking? One of the big questions about whether there is possible criminal exposure here for Trump is his state of mind at the time he was making these false allegations. It seems really clear that we're learning that his state of mind is that lots and lots of people were confronting him with the truth.

Brian Lehrer: If he gets indicted, he's going to claim insanity, narcissistic psychopathy as a defense, something like that?

Emily Bazelon: Something like that. The other thing that's fascinating to me is seeing Bill Barr reach this limit. Remember, Barr is this former administration official from the George H W Bush administration. He had this record of Republican public service. He left government service.

Brian Lehrer: We would say he helped George H W Bush when that Bush was president wriggle out of legal culpability for the Iran-Contra scandal.

Emily Bazelon: Yes, and Caspar Weinberger and other people who were indicted, who he helped them get out of legal straits back then. When he came on board in the Trump administration after a long period working for big corporations in America, he came in and he helped Trump with the Mueller investigation. He really spun the Mueller report in a way that made it seem like there was no there, there, and because the Mueller report itself wasn't public when Barr started talking about it, his version of events took hold and really helped former president Trump.

Now you see him to just get to the end of his rope. He's not willing to buy into this false reality that Trump's crying to create. I think part of the reason he's so dismissive in his testimony is that once you oppose former President Trump, you have to really deliver the goods because you're going against your own constituency if you're Bill Barr. I think you see here this scone he has developed for the president whom he served.

Brian Lehrer: Steven in Harlem, you're on WNYC. Hi, Steven.

Steven: Thank you for taking my call. Great to hear. I want to say that I really appreciate the coverage, all great stuff. I've a been a political junkie since McGovern. Who's listening is my question. I know all these Republicans, they made up their minds years ago. I don't know if you remember, but about two and a half years ago, I called up and said we're witnessing the beginning of the end of democracy. I still believe that. I believe this ex-president is going to be reinstalled one way or the other in 2024, and then look out, we're not going to recognize the country as being a democracy. I don't believe after that.

Brian Lehrer: Steven, thank you for your call pessimistic though it is. Emily, I guess this goes to what you were talking about a minute ago and we just can't know the answer yet as to who these hearings might land with, who are either swing voters or even past Trump voters who might decide they prefer somebody else for president should he run for the Republican nomination. Or I think to his more global point, the larger implications for democracy.

Emily Bazelon: Yes, so I think this is the million-dollar question the committee is doing. Its very best to break through. It called a lot of Republicans to testify, played that testimony in hopes of reaching Republican voters and swing voters. These are your people, look at what they are saying. The first question is going to be whether there is any move away from former president Trump among elected Republicans, who so far have mostly stood with him and the people who have broken with him have been punished by the party, including Liz Cheney who is helping to lead this committee.

Is that going to change? Do people see here that it's so clear that these were lies that they move away from Trump? If that doesn't happen, I think it's going to be really hard to see a shift in public opinion among Republican voters. There's also the problem of how the right wing media is covering these hearings or failing to cover them because that is really the audience that matters the most.

Brian Lehrer: I guess it's worth noting that CNN and MSNBC are carrying the hearings live. Fox News Channel is not, but also, Emily, notably, I was surprised to see that the big three network entertainment channels have been carrying the hearing; CBS, NBC, and ABC. Notably not Fox, which it's really the big four entertainment networks these days unlike, say, in the Watergate era where there were really only the big three. There's also that side of Fox, they're not carrying it either, but CBS, NBC, and ABC are. The Nielsen numbers that came out for Thursday night's hearing show that 20 million people watched, which would put it among the most-watched shows of the year.

Also, suggests to me that it's not just the politics junkies who know exactly where CNN, MSNBC, and Fox are on their cable systems, but people who may have accidentally run into it while they were looking for America's Got Talent or whatever. I wonder what you think about that.

Emily Bazelon: I think it matters. I think there is some sense in the mainstream TV media that it's time to help Americans to try to help democracy by covering these hearings. There also certainly is been tons of replay on shows like yours on big TV broadcast over the days, the mornings that continue after the hearing and all of those things are important. Whether this is really going to break through to Americans who believe in Donald Trump, I don't know because the idea of having shared facts for the entire country is so crucial, but

it has been incredibly elusive on this question of the big lie and the 2020 election.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to take one more break, and then continue with Emily Bazelon and your calls. One more clip of Trump himself that they used in the hearing today as we talk about the hearing this morning, putting it together with the one on Thursday night and preview the ones yet to come in the January 6th select committee televised and radio broadcast, public hearings series that they're putting together.

We will touch with Emily on an interesting Supreme Court ruling that came down this morning, even though, no, spoiler alert, it was not about Roe versus Wade, and no, it was not about people's ability to carry guns in public in New York City, but an interesting and potentially important ruling on immigration. We'll get to that too. Stay with us.

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This is special coverage of the January 6th committee hearings. I'm Brian Lehrer, we'll take this till two o'clock. Allison Stewart will be back here in her regular time slot with all of it tomorrow as the committee takes one day off, then they will present again Wednesday morning at 10:00, and then Thursday afternoon. We are told Emily Bazelon from the New York Times Magazine and Yale Law School and Slate's Politics Gabfest is with us as we break down some of what the hearing means. We're going to play one more clip that the committee used this morning of Donald Trump himself.

I think this was pretty striking after we heard his attorney general, William Barr, and his deputy attorney general, Richard Donoghue, detail all the efforts that they went to, all the lanes that they went to to explain to Trump point by point why there was not enough election fraud to flip the result in state after state that Trump was trying to contest and claim there was that much fraud in. What did Trump go out and say at one point knowing that his attorney general was reality-based? He said this.

Donald Trump: This election was over, and then they did dumps. They call them dumps, big, massive dumps in Michigan and Pennsylvania and all over. How the FBI and Department of Justice, I don't know, maybe they're involved, but how people are allowed to get away with this stuff is unbelievable.

Brian Lehrer: Trump on Fox last fall. Emily, so there he is implicating even the Justice Department, which means, by implication, Barr, and even the FBI.

Emily Bazelon: Right, I think you see him here incredibly frustrated that he can't get the Justice Department to bend to his will. Bill Barr is saying to him, "This is not what we do. We are not your lawyers, we are an independent authority." This is really basic stuff about how separation of powers and American democracy works and trump did not wanna accept it. He wanted the justice department to step in on his behalf and say that there was fraud, even though that was the opposite of what they had found.

Brian Lehrer: Listener tweets, "Please consider that Trump donors may take issue with their money being collected and not funneled into the defense fund, which doesn't appear to have ever existed." Emily, that was a new piece of it to me this morning. I don't know if you were aware of it previously, but there's "Trump defense fund" that a lot of emails and other solicitations went out to Trump, donors, and supporters to give money to after the election, apparently never existed. Are you clear on what this story really is?

Emily Bazelon: I definitely had heard questions about this. All these emails, they're drumming up all this money. Do people really understand what they're giving it to? Is the money actually being spent on this defense? It seems like we heard a pretty telling answer this morning that no, this was a cash cow that was not being used for the purposes that people were being told their money was going to.

Brian Lehrer: Where did the money go? Do we know that?

Emily Bazelon: I don't think we know that yet. I think we may be able to find out. The RNC, the Republican National Committee has been trying to block a subpoena that would provide more information from Salesforce, the vendor they were using about where this money was going. It's not surprising that they're trying to prevent that information from getting out. It's probably not helpful to them or at least one could speculate, and also, they can raise questions about whether this committee should be able to have that kind of view inside a political operation. We'll see how that lawsuit plays out and what more comes to light.

Brian Lehrer: Did I hear the number correctly, $250 million raised by that alleged defense fund?

Emily Bazelon: That was what they said, yes.

Brian Lehrer: Wow, so there could be criminal charges of fraud related to that, and whether that goes up to the president himself, we don't know, but it sounds like potentially there was something criminal there.

Emily Bazelon: I think one takeaway from these hearings is whether there is going to be significantly more pressure on Attorney General Merrick Garland to be considering high-level criminal charges, either against former president Trump or against the people around him. This is just a very, very delicate issue. To talk about criminally charging a former president of the United States for conduct related to an election, one imagines. I think it's clear from his reticence so far that Attorney General Garland is very right nervous.

Brian Lehrer: We really don't want to be that country that puts its former leaders in jail after they're thrown out. We've never been that country, but at what point does it become necessary to defend democracy?

Emily Bazelon: That's exactly the conundrum. That is exactly the dilemma for the justice department. At what point are you putting the democracy in more jeopardy by not bringing charges because you're trying to deter future presidents, or indeed, Trump if he becomes president again from doing this another time?

Brian Lehrer: Katherine in Pittsburgh, you're on WNYC. Hi, Katherine.

Katherine: Hi, Brian. I'm here to say that I think this has been a positive event because it is a first official report. Of course, the media was actually the first report, but this is the official report of what happened. I don't know if this will penetrate the totality of the big lie for everyone. I'm sure it will not, but it's a clarifying moment, a new point at which people listening can make a decision about it. I am worried, on the other hand, I think that this is a very worrisome time for democracy in our country.

Brian Lehrer: Katherine, thank you.

Katherine: Okay, bye.

Emily Bazelon: A lot of people remain worried, and then the other dot, if you put this together with Thursday night, that they connected, though. They didn't really come back to it explicitly this morning that I heard. Emily, was that those who came to DC on January 6th to commit violence, many of them had the plan from the start? I guess they will look in future sessions of these hearings, whether Trump and his campaign can be tied to that at all, but we heard testimony on how members of the Proud Boys, for example, who said they were coming to DC to hear Donald Trump speak at this will be wild rally, did not listen to his speech.

Instead they apparently went to the Capitol to do reconnaissance for how to violently break-in. There's all of what we heard today and somehow it needs to connect to that, right?

Emily Bazelon: Yes, exactly. I think we have more evidence from these hearings about scoping out the Capitol in advance. That sounds like a conspiracy. It sounds like planning. Then there's the question of how far up the food chain the committee can connect the dots? One thing that I was thinking about during your caller's comments is that it's important to remember just the significance of Congress doing its job here. One of the things Congress has the power to do is investigate and subpoena people and try to get to the bottom of difficult contested controversies and shed light on matters like this.

What it's supposed to be doing when it has what's called a valid legislative purpose, that's when Congress can investigate, it's supposed to be trying to figure out what went wrong so Congress can prevent it from going wrong in the future. I think whatever your take is on this committee, it is trying very hard to get to the bottom of what happened on January 6th in the hope of protecting democracy in the future.

Brian Lehrer: All right, we've got a few minutes left. I do want to touch on one of the Supreme Court rulings this morning that I know you were paying attention to. This is a case that we have not talked about on the show before or has not gotten a whole lot of media attention called Johnson versus Arteaga-Martinez if I'm saying that right. A case about whether non-citizens in immigration detention are owed a bond hearing after six months in custody. Explain the basis and what the court decided.

Emily Bazelon: Mr. Arteaga-Martinez was a Mexican citizen. He tried to immigrate to this country. He said that he would be persecuted or tortured if he returned to Mexico. Then an asylum officer said he'd established a reasonable fear of persecution or torture. That's the first bar you have to cross, but then the Department of Homeland Security held onto him in custody while there were further proceedings before an immigration judge, and he was in custody for months without a bond hearing. The question before the court, does the statute require a bond hearing within six months for someone who has passed this initial threshold of establishing credible fear of torture or persecution?

The answer from the court was a resounding no. This is an eight-to-one decision. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a liberal, wrote the opinion. She said that in the text of the statute, there's nothing that says that you have to have this bond hearing within six months. I think what's really going on here is yet one more illustration of how few rights immigrants have when they come to this country without authorization. You just really enter a legal nether world in which there is very, very little due process.

Brian Lehrer: In our last 30 seconds, now that the court has delivered this opinion the way you described it, are we left with a possibility that some immigrants in detention might just be there indefinitely if they're deemed a flight risk or a danger to community until who knows how long it might take to decide their status?

Emily Bazelon: I can certainly see why you would raise that concern. That is not what the opinion holds. The opinion just says you don't get the hearing within six months. It doesn't say the government can hold you indefinitely. That's another case. [chuckles]

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Brian Lehrer: Emily Bazelon, New York Times Magazine writer. I hear you have a good story coming out that I won't break the New York Times embargo on,-

Emily Bazelon: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: - but we're going to have you back to talk about that and more legal analysis very possibly as this month of June goes on at the Supreme court. Emily also teaches at Yale Law School and cohosts the Slate Politics Gabfest. Thanks for coming on for our special coverage, Emily.

Emily Bazelon: Thanks so much for having me, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. I'll be back with my regular show tomorrow morning. Alison Stewart will be back with her regular show tomorrow at noon. This has been special coverage of the January 6th committee hearing.

 

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